Jason E. Sweat's weblog

It is official, I am now a Zend Ceritified Engineer. To quote my notification:

Dear Jason Sweat,

Congratulations on passing the Zend PHP Certification exam!

As a Zend Certified Engineer you are now among an elite group that leads the
growth of PHP.

Now I should figure out how to work this logo into my WordPress theme 😉

I took the exam one morning during the php|tropics conference. There was a recent thread on SitePoint where I mentioned what I thought about the exam itself (my post is #46). Many thanks to Marco for footing the bill for the exam.

Looks like Paul read his email before me and got “first post” in the blogosphere from the newly minted php|tropics ZCEs.

I followed up on a post from Ben Ramsey on a MIT survey of bloggers, and did my part to contribute to science 😉

As stated in this thread, SitePoint has a new Mentor… me This means I get this shiny orange badge above my avatar. In order to maintain this honor, I have to continue to be adicted to the SitePoint forums (in particular, my favorite the PHP Application Design forum), and I have to continue to behave myself.

Hopefully this will in some small way give back some to the community which has given me the opportunity to get to know several people whom I now consider good friends: Marcus, Harry, and Jeff.

The book is getting closer. Yesterday we had an official announcement on the php|architect website, which pointed to the order page. It looks like Marco is giving a 10% preorder discount, so everyone should order 10 copies today, and effectively get a free copy. 😉

I would have also emphasized unit testing in the blurb. While there are a few PHP books out there which have chapters or sections on unit testing, I don’t believe there is any other book which emphasizes the practice as much as I have. Unit tests are not only present in the code download for each chapter, but are integral to the explanations in each chapter as well. Many times when I present examples of working code, it is within the context of a unit test. I also tried to explain the basics of Test Driven Development, and have a few examples shown using TDD iterations.

The Adapter chapter is off to layout so we are down to the last few chapters! I am really looking forward to holding the dead tree edition

Last night I sent my chapter on the Specification pattern in for layout. This passes the > 50% mark for chapters through editing and off to layout as well.

This chapter was fun to write because it strays a bit from the Gang-of-Four/Fowler PoEAA design pattern mainstream. Fowler has written some articles on this pattern and Eric Evans covers it in some detail in “Domain Driven Design”. I first show a “hard-coded” example, and then a parameterized specification which can take a WACT DataSource object as the item being tested. The last example in the chapter shows how to create a composite structure of concrete specification objects to act as a “Policy”.

The chapter is an evolution of some early work I did with the Specification pattern in this thread.

By popular request, here is the complete table of contents:

0. Preface
1. Programming Practices
2. The ValueObject Pattern
3. The Factory Pattern
4. The Singleton Pattern
5. The Registry Pattern
6. The MockObject Pattern
7. The Strategy Pattern
8. The Iterator Pattern
9. The Observer Pattern
10. The Specification Pattern
11. The Proxy Pattern
12. The Decorator Pattern
13. The Adapter Pattern
14. The ActiveRecord Pattern
15. The TableDataGateway Pattern
16. The DataMapper Pattern
17. The Model-View-Controller Pattern
18. Conclusion

Appendices:

1. Patterns Quick Reference
2. SimpleTest Testing Practices

update: Had some funny characters in my summary, removed them to see if it helps peoples feeds.

Chiming in with the chorus, many thanks go out to Rasmus, and every other contributor to PHP, for creating a phenomenon.

Following the tradition of the other PHP anniversary posts:

What was I doing 10 years ago?
I was working for a small engineering firm in Iowa doing process control work in the steel industry. Our control system used artificial neural networks to optimize the control of electric arc furnaces. This work expanded into SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) and led eventually to me displaying this process control data on web pages via ASP and IIS.

When did I get involved with PHP?
In 2000, I was looking for a free—as in beer—way to create dynamic web pages for a partnership whose accounting I maintain. My UNIX administrator at work turned me on to the LAMP stack and I have never looked back. I have brought PHP into use for both web page development and batch scripting at work, and have written several articles, books and numerous presentations on PHP.

Happy birthday PHP, and many happy returns. Thank you PHP team for endless hours of toil.